10Apr 07

The pie edition of FT and their loverly lollards was notable for having more research per square inch for any episode. Which was a touch infuriating when I couldn’t get it out and instead fell back on fallacious articles about there being “not enough time for God to write down pi*”. A much better argument would have been due to nondeterminancy, which is to say that there not being an exact definition for pi means that God does not know everything, which removes God’s omniscience in one fell swoop. And if that doesn’t do it, Quantum Physics does.

Mathematical arguments for and against the existence of God do seem to miss the point anyway, that God is a being of faith, and a lot of people have no faith in mathematics. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem (which contains God) could also be seen to be a threat to God’s omniscience, and omnipotence: none of which will actually damage organized religion. Instead my on air quoting of pi incorrectly seems more troublesome: here it is to 1,000 decimal places.

Can you see the face of God? Anyway, to find other things, such as yr home phone number the pi-searcher is here:http://www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi

The other thing I did not get on to, because we got distracted in telling everyone how rubbish the film PI was (and still is). It was handy ways of remembering Pi, called Piems. See its like Poems, but with Pi in it. Oh, you people with so little time. Generally the Piems have words the length of the individual digits of Pi. Not sure what they do when they get to a zero.

“Now I defy a tenet gallantly
Of circle canon law: these integers
Importing circles’ quotients are, we see,
Unwieldy long series of cockle burs
Put all together, get no clarity;
Mnemonics shan’t describeth so reformed
Creating, with a grammercy plainly,
A sonnet liberated yet conformed.
Strangely, the queer’st rules I manipulate
Being followéd, do facilitate
Whimsical musings from geometric bard.
This poesy, unabashed as it’s distressed,
Evolvéd coherent – a simple test,
Discov’ring poetry no numerals jarred. “

None of which gets to the fundamental point I wanted to make that in the real world, pi does not really exist anyway, as nothing is perfectly circular. Except the logic involved in disproving God’s existence! Or indeed the little known fact that the word Pint is derived from a mathematical formula, namely Pi N T, where N and T are two now defunct units of measurement introduced in fifteenth century by Henry VIII. As befitted a God-king, seceding from Rome, he developed a measurement system based on his body. The Thumb (about two inches) and the Neck (about three thumbs). Hence a pint was defined a s PI x Neck x Thumb, shortened to Pint!

*A rubbish argument due to the “outside time” point made by Cis. However it is a thoroughly convincing argument for anyone who does not really understand infinity**

**Six nines in a row at position 762! Six numbers in a row doesn’t happen again until position 193,034!

About the Author

Pete Baran: Half formed opinions on everything, three quarter formed opinions on film so that's my main topic of discussion. Started Pumpkin State and Pumpkin Pubs in 2000 which got incorporated in a Great News For All Our Readers style in 2004 into Freaky Trigger.

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